Like I have said before, I love history, especially early medieval history. One of the blogs I follow is the one run by Medievalists.net. I had seen several announcements for the new installment of Penguin’s history of Europe, written by Chris Wickham. When the reviews came in, and were very positive, I couldn’t help myself. On a recent trip to England I got the book.

The book starts out with a short introduction into the Roman Empire in the third and fourth century. From that the book focusses mostly on the history of the Byzantine empire, the Franks, current day England and the Islam empire. Besides that it also looks at the situations in other parts of Europe, from Scandinavia to Ireland, from Bulgaria to Poland.

For me, the explanations of Wickham were very clear. In this introduction he starts out by explaining how he came to the conclussions that he came to, and how contemporary sources might not be trustable, but can still be useful. I have read reviews that say that the book is a bit too advanced to be an introduction, but for me the level was never too advanced. Some things might have been explored too deeply, but there was always a reason for that, to set up other chapters.

What I loved most about this book is that it not only tells you what happened, but it explains in detail how it could happen, and why it happened in a certain place and time, and not somewhere else. It also tried to say things about regions you don’t read much about (Eastern Europe), which helped to complete the picture.

What I am trying to say, is that this book was a very good and very readable introduction to medieval history, and that I highly recommend it to anyone interested in early European history. ( )

This is a narrative history version of Wickham's Framing the Middle Ages designed for a wider audience and part of Penguin's new multi-authored history of Europe series. It represents the latest views on the period and covers not only Western Europe but Eastern as well as North Africa and the Middle East. It's impossible to cover 400-1000AD across such a large geographic area of time with any meaningful generalization so Wickham broke it down by time and place. In the process he discredits traditional narratives and shows the period to be much richer and more diverse than generally thought (ie. myth of a "Dark Ages").

One of the ways I test a survey history is to ask how well it covers things I already know about in depth, and then put myself in the shoes of a newbie and ask myself if this is a good introduction to the material. Unfortunately I think Wickham failed in this regard - he seems to know so much that he can't help skimming over the core stuff and expanding on ideas that are subtle and difficult for a beginner to understand without context. The books value for me is in the Introduction, the first 100 pages or so, and the last chapter, in which he goes into historiography and the changing nature of the field. As well the bibliography is excellent. Certainly there is a lot to be gained from this volume and it's important but I still look forward to a more accessible history of the period. ( )